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Thursday, August 4, 2011

The Road Home

The road home from our annual vacation to see family in Oregon was paved in hell, LOL

We were cruising along, making decent time, when Mark noticed a noise. He didn't even have time to identify it before this...

He was able to get us safely to the side of the road. Thankfully, no one was hurt and no accidents occurred.

Loaded for the trip home, getting to our jack was not easy, LOL. Because we have just the standard factory jack we figured we'd have to unload the majority of the van to use it safely thus elected to call on AAA. The rain helped decide it :)

Waiting for AAA to show up...

Then the decision: continue on to the next city and hope we can find a tire store open or turn around and hope to find a tire store open at the previous city.

Did I forget to mention it was Sunday afternoon when this happened? Sorry.

We continued on figuring worst case scenario we'd have better luck finding a hotel for the night. We squeaked in by the skin of our emergency spare tire -- why don't they put full-sized spares on vehicles anymore? -- into the Eugene Sears service bay 15 minutes to closing. (Huge shout out of thanks guys in Sears Automotive! You saved our bacon.)

Trying not to completely waste the stop we went to dinner. All this put us 3 hours behind schedule and we ended up driving through Death Valley in the heat of the day.

Did I mention we were loaded down? We had to turn off the A/C a couple times while driving through Death Valley to make sure the poor van didn't over heat. (Yeah, that would have been the icing on the cake of the trip.)

After four years of making this trip I guess we were due but boy was this the neverending trip.

We had a challenge on the way up too, you can read about that here, but that one ended up being kinda cool :)

2 comments:

Argh! That's awful. And why does it always have to happen on a Sunday afternoon?

Thank God, you didn't get stranded in Death Valley with a carload of kids.

We've had some doozy bad breaks over the years but the most nerve-wracking was the year we did a semi circle around the west side of the US. We had just left Pike's Peak when the transmission went out (on our brand new SUV).

Somehow Greg got it going again but we only had 2nd gear. We traveled all the way back to east Texas in second gear. We stopped only once (100 miles from home) because we had a friend who could take us in if we couldn't get the car restarted.

I didn't know I could hold my bladder for ten hours. It was close though. LOL!